Step off the Curb
by Bleach-ed-Na-tsu
Summary: Streetlights offered the safety that came with light and sight, however, as Tsuna stood on the curb and dared gaze into the darkness, he realised how foolish he had been, just how dangerous it was to avoid the night that was his birthright.


**This is based on a poem I wrote not too long ago about how eerie it is to ride the bus alone at 9pm in the winter, especially here in Canada. But also, just how easy it is for someone anyone to find you if you stick to the streetlights. It's all a bit subjective and wishy-washy, but I think it's an interesting concept if applied to Tsuna.**

 **I hope you enjoy it regardless!**

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Step off the Curb

 **Summary:** Streetlights offered the safety that came with light and sight, however, as Tsuna stood on the curb and dared gaze into the darkness, he realised how foolish he had been, just how dangerous it was to avoid the night that was his birthright.

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Tsuna worried about the darkness.

As a child his night light remained lit always, and if the bathroom light was out before he went to bed he had night terrors that lasted for a week. The darkness to Tsuna felt damning.

After all, after darkness fell the night seemed so different. The air seemed tired and wary, as if the joy had been sucked from it, as if it were the people in the day that gave the wind its major chimes and created the tempo on which the wind danced.

His mother didn't help this affliction of course, always panicked if Tsuna didn't get home before street-lights turned on; always flinching if they were walking home from one place or another at dusk.

Bless her heart for being worried about her only child, but Nana's inherent fear of anything darker than sunset always drove Tsuna mad with his own unfounded concern.

After all he loved the stars, and the sky through all its transitions. His night terrors stopped, and he wasn't even ten before the nightlight was cast into a drawer. He wasn't naturally afraid of the dark. He loved to sleep and couldn't sleep in the day. The _dark_ wasn't really scary when you think about it.

Still, Tsuna skipped across the pools of streetlamp light like he was playing hopscotch with the monsters, and he didn't know why.

Tsuna would stare out the window of libraries as the sky's colour drained away, and the panic would grow only when he realised street lamps had turned on, and the coats of the people wandering the streets had turned monochrome, as if the colour had drained from them too.

Tsuna would run, because his mother would worry and Tsuna didn't take his cell phone. He'd be a mess of panting, heaving chest and skittish eyes by the time he entered his house, and his mother would fuss. And Tsuna would blink and confusion would sweep over him. Like a conditioned response to the dark.

With Reborn came a newfound terror in the night. The mafia were the blackest of the night time terrors, the monsters that banished Tsuna to the lightened pools of sanctuary. Tsuna grew truly afraid instead of wary, forced his friend to hide with him in the pools of light. For safety.

Tsuna was terrified of the darkness that came with his birthright, with the guns under his pillow, with the routine of free running at dusk, because Reborn refused to let Tsuna be weakened by lowered lights.

At first, Tsuna was terrified for himself. Hitmen lurked in the night after all, their company was shadows, and their allies the darkened alleys that led away from those pools of light at bus stops. The bus stops, and the corners of the street were safe. The awnings of stores, even after they closed ensured that Tsuna could be seen, that he could see himself. If something happened, then someone grabbed him, then others would be able to see that and could do something about it.

Then his friends turned up, his little brother, and his brothers in arms. They were drenched in it, the blackness and promise of first blood. They were on the precipice of the dark, skipping into pools of light when training ran too late alongside Tsuna with little concern for the monsters they were outrunning. Monsters that Tsuna had been conditioned to see just beyond the halos he and his friends darted between. It wrecked Tsuna to watch them, because they seemed so _okay_ with the way their steps slipped and they nudged closer to the alleyways than they did the street corners.

Tsuna was terrified of the mafia that lurked in the dark.

But he was ever so fascinated too.

After all, Reborn shivered every time Tsuna stepped into the light, and Tsuna thought it was because Reborn exposed himself; a creature of the night, of blood and blackness like the Hitman surely didn't like to admit that he was weakened in the light.

But still Reborn remained with Tsuna, stepping up to street corners bathed in light. Did his duty, and protected Tsuna.

And that's when the thought struck, like lightning, and like quicksilver. It washed Tsuna with a realisation ever so simple and ever so cunning.

Tsuna had been conditioned, by his mother, to fear the dark, and run at dusk. To get home before the monsters could get him.

" _If you stay in the light, Tsu-kun, then you'll be safe. The streetlamps will stop the scary things from getting you."_ His mother had told him and Tsuna suddenly had a thought.

Who was the darkness that Nana feared, for surely a grown woman didn't need night-lights and could take classes or keep weapons on her if she worried about rapists and robbers. Yet still she instilled in her son such a literal black-and-white understanding of good and bad and of safety and fear.

Nana kept a gun in her room, and spare knives in the doorway of the house.

Nana called Iemitsu a star, and stars were only seen on the darkest nights, even the smallest of lights dimmed them until they were memories. Light pollution disappeared the starts and _blanded_ the darkness.

The mafia were the night in everything they did. Tsuna was born to be the brightest thing in the sky, the saint to guide the darkness, the promise of safety. Tsuna was the Promised Land in the darkness, but for once he realised that didn't mean that he was the light.

Tsuna was meant to be the moon, the moon that brightened the stars and that guided those in the darkness. Tsuna wasn't born to be blinding, nor belligerent, he was born to ascend the throne bathed in blood and darkness and soften the edges of the darkness.

Tsuna stood, one evening when he was sixteen, on the street corner somewhere between his house and his high school. He almost finished his training, at least that which could be completed in the relative safety of Japan and was getting ready to head to Italy. He watched the people as they walked, watched their shadows skip between the lampposts in a lazy kind of stroll.

Tsuna could see them. He could see everyone in the flickers that their movements created. He could see them even when he looked to the sky.

He could see his own flickers like flare gun shots. And they were painfully brilliant even thought he was stood still.

He understood, then, why Hayato and Reborn flinched when Tsuna insisted on remaining along common streets, and highly populated areas as soon as the moon rose into the sky.

Surely, when Tsuna was and was becoming a highly valued creature of the night, he was safer remaining in the dark, than he was straying into the light.

He was seen, in the streetlight.

He was visible, and his moves mapped out even before he took them.

He was blinded by the halo that promised protection, assured him that others _would_ see him. And they would. Oh they'd see him, see everything that he was and would be, where he would go. Tsuna's halo of light made the darkness so much darker than it ever had to be. Made it so that even bathed in light, _because_ he was bathed in light, he couldn't see the hands reaching out to snatch him away.

Tsuna's eyes rose to the sky and watched the moon. It looked so dull and yellow. Giving off so little light that it was a wonder people ever called it beautiful.

But then again, Tsuna was under the artificial ring of white and yellow so bright it burned his eyes and dulled everything else. Including the senses. Including the sense of self-preservation. Including the sense of imminent danger what with its _promise_ of protection from dark things.

" _Tsuna, if you were being chased in the woods, or down the street at night, would you turn out your light?"_ Reborn had asked Tsuna one day. Of course Tsuna had panicked, said most definitely that he would not and Reborn had sighed. _"Tsuna, how much easier would it be for you to hide if they couldn't see you at all? All youèd have to do is turn out the light, run a little, and then slip away to silence and you'd lose them as quick as that."_

And that is what opened Tsuna's eyes, now here at sixteen, standing on the edge of the curb and watching the shadows of an alley he'd once been terrified of.

He laughed and stepped off the curb, the darkness shifting as he walked further from the streetlamp. Things became fuzzy, but he could spy the soft outlines the moon gave off, safe and subtle, and he felt safe.

Reborn was right to shiver when Tsuna stuck to the light. He had been _exposed_ by the light. It was so much easier to hide, to track, to be safe if he hid in the dark. Tsuna was a hot commodity, in the Mafia, in the darkness.

And no, no one _could_ see Tsuna if he avoided the light given off by streetlamps. No one would be able to come to his aide if he was snatched up, if dusk came and he hasn't made it home.

Not those who might save him. Not those who might snatch him either.

And that was the point. As Tsuna stepped off the curb, he gave the wind a minor tune to dance to and he greeted the moon. As Tsuna stepped off the curb, Tsuna dared someone to even try to catch him as he slinked into the darkness.


End file.
